Red Shell in Games Sparks Massive Gamer Outcry, Calling for Removal

After the discovery of marketing analytic tool Red Shell in several games, users are rallying for its removal, calling it a "spyware" device.

A recent movement in the gaming world has sparked all kinds of controversy among gamers: the installation of Red Shell. The public outcry came after several companies announced plans to package the analytics app, Red Shell, with some of the games. The intent of this action was to run social marketing programs with specific affiliate IDs using the services provided by the software development kit (SDK) app. When a user installed a new game, Red Shell would ping that information back to the developer and give them an idea of what games are getting installed where.

The controversy came with the suggestion that Red Shell was doing more than just logging new installs and setting up social marketing programs. For starters, Reddit and Steam users have been complaining that Red Shell has been creating a digital fingerprint of each user, including information about their habits, gaming rigs, online interactions, and perhaps more. Additionally, plenty of game studios haven’t explicitly told users that Red Shell is now installed in their games, or if they did, it was made as an opt-out package instead of opt-in, as is required in accordance with most privacy laws across the world. Essentially, the complaint is that Red Shell is acting less like a marketing app and more like a malicious spyware app.

To combat this, gamers have been laboriously collecting information about Red Shell files and processes, lodging complaints and collecting data in forums like Reddit, which contains the most updated and current list as this article ages. Several gaming studios have already pledged to remove Red Shell from their games as a result of this criticism.

As of 6/26/2018, the games that have pledged to remove or removed Red Shell from the installation include:

Emily Hobbs is a Staff Writer at Dualshockers. When she's not writing articles, she's also a senior Computer Information Systems with a Forensics focus major at Stevenson University, where she bonded with her roommates freshman year via Dark Souls and Outlast, as all true friendships should begin. She enjoys any kind of game except for the ones she doesn't, and a good RPG or horror game can make her day.